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It looks as if Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Energy Committee, has lost her GOP primary to Joe Miller, a former judge who made maximum use of his endorsements from Sarah Palin and Tea Party groups.

The moderate Sen. Murkowski is trailing by 2,000 votes this morning, and she would have to take over 60% of the absentee votes still outstanding to overcome that gap.

Should he be declared the victor, Mr. Miller will be the overwhelming favorite in the general election in conservative Alaska and a national symbol of the Tea Party insurgency. He grew up in Kansas but moved west to Alaska 16 years ago. A former U.S. Magistrate Judge in Fairbanks, he is a member of the conservative Federalist Society. He earned a Bronze Star for bravery in the Gulf War after graduating near the top of his class at West Point.

Many people will try to explain Mr. Miller's shocking upset by pointing to the presence of a successful anti-abortion measure on the primary ballot that drove up turnout; the influence of Sarah Palin's endorsement of him; and how Mr. Miller's army of grassroots volunteers made up for a 15-to-1 deficit in campaign spending.

Yet one incident encapsulates all that went wrong with the Murkowski campaign. Seeing the polls closing quickly in the final days, her advisers unleashed a last-minute attack on Monday that featured popular Anchorage talk show host Dan Fagan accusing Mr. Miller of making false statements about the incumbent's record on health care. The radio ad featured a clip from Mr. Fagan's Aug. 5 show in which the host screamed at Mr. Miller and accused him of lying about Ms. Murkowski's reluctance to push for repeal of the Obama health-care bill.

But several hours after the release of the Murkowski ad, Mr. Fagan announced he was endorsing Mr. Miller after "further weighing the evidence." Mr. Fagan said that "Lisa Murkowski is now so desperate that she's playing a clip from my radio show for one of her ads without my permission. Let me make one thing clear: I believe Lisa Murkowski is a liberal." Mr. Fagan went on to say that he was swayed by watching a clip of an August 2009 town hall in which Sen. Murkowski declined to rule out supporting some form of "government-run" health care. "I am not so afraid to say that we cannot absolutely, positively not have a government-run plan, but what we have to have is a government-run plan that actually works," was how Senator Murkowski answered a question about ObamaCare.

The controversy about the ad dominated last-minute news coverage of the primary and probably sealed Sen. Murkowski's fate.

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